Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

10.23.2013

Steven Spielberg's ghost

Domestic disturbance: the Freeling family at home in Poltergeist (1982).

Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist
(1982), which has been one of my
favorite horror films since childhood, could be considered a knockoff of Stuart
Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979)
in that it concerns an American family’s realization that their seemingly
ordinary suburban home is a hotbed of paranormal activity. But Poltergeist is the vastly superior film, in part because
it has a command of tone that The Amityville Horror lacks.
Poltergeist seems to me
one of the most convincing portrayals of suburban American life I’ve ever seen
in a movie. Steve and Diane Freeling
(played with a kind of quiet brilliance by Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams)
are like two grown-up hippies who have suddenly found themselves looking after
three kids, a dog, and a split-level; there’s a loose, messy, sunny-California
vibe to the house, which is casually strewn with toys and food wrappers and
where Mom and Dad are prone to smoking a joint together in bed in front of the
TV before they turn in. The kids
(played by Heather O’Rourke, Oliver Robbins, and Dominique Dunne) are seventy-percent
cute, thirty-percent annoying. And
throughout the entire film—not only, it should be noted, at moments when it’s
narratively required that the film to convey this—we’re never unconvinced that
these people are tied to one another by bonds of love and commitment. Where The Amityville Horror is the story of a haunted house and the rather
dour, miserable people who have the misfortune to live there, Poltergeist is the story of a family weathering a trauma
together, in which the haunted house also bears memories of suburban bliss.

The messy-funny portrait of suburban domesticity
that we get in Poltergeist, with
its good-hearted, flawed, working-class parents and precocious kids, invites
comparison to those that we find in films like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Is it any surprise, then,
that Poltergeist was co-written and produced
by none other than Steven Spielberg?
Rumors abound that Spielberg also helped Hooper direct portions of the
film. The real ghost hanging over Poltergeist, then, is Spielberg himself, who keeps making his presence felt in the
form of those details of suburban life that infuse the film. As in E.T. and Close Encounters, the
supernatural intrudes upon that world in ways that feel unsettling and driven
by a nervous, absurd comedy. That
comedy is one of the ghostly Spielbergian touches in Poltergeist (along with a scene that repeats almost verbatim Karen Allen’s attack
by skeletons in Raiders of the Lost Ark,
released just one year before; see above). Of all the ghostly spirits hanging over the Freeling
household, Spielberg’s is certainly the most benign—and the most powerful.